Tercel

Oh, so conservative scholars don't fall into the category of "reasonable people and scholars"? It doesn't require naming a non-conservative scholar to substantiate my position!

I don't know whether you'd count NT Wright as a non-conservative scholar or not.

Vorkosigan

C/mon, Tercel. Wright is an arch-conservative who thinks faith and history out to be mixed. The last poster didn't say anything about conservatives not being reasonable. That was you. He just asked you to supply him with the name of a non-conservative who thinks the question of the census is not settled. Can you?

Benjamin Franklin

I did not say that non conservatives are not reasonable people but given that you said that are a large number of reasonable scholars supporting your position, you should be able to find at least one non-conservative scholar to support your position unless your are claiming that the majority of non-conservatives are not reasonable.

Furthermore, I agree that conservative scholars can be reasonable. Some of their research agree very well with mainstream research but you have to admit a layman would have the right to be skeptical of a position that is only supported by conservative scholars

If just quoting conservative scholars to substantiate your position is sufficient, you can refute a lot of well established results in NT criticism e.g all Pauline letters/epistles are genuine.


BF

[ December 22, 2002: Message edited by: Benjamin Franklin ]</p>

Tercel

Well not everyone agrees, the following being an extract from an article about a TV show in which Wright appeared.


And for an arch-Conservative scholar he's certainly managed to annoy evangelicals pretty well with his stance the proper interpretation of Paul among other things:
From the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0802844456/ref=pd_sbs_b_4/102-4644543-2678557?v=glance" target="_blank">reviews on Amazon</a> of What Saint Paul Really Said:

"[Wright's] interpetation raises the ire of traditionalists and evangelicals"

"Though Wright's theology is questionable in other areas, it is in the area of soteriology that his unorthodoxy and anti-Protestantism comes out. Wright's view of justification is heretical and unorthodox by traditional Protestant standards and any good traditional Protestant should read this book with caution....
One who adopts the "New Perspective on Paul" view or denies "sola fide" should not be considered evangelical or Protestant."

My own understanding of "a Conservative scholar" is of a person who doesn't rock the Conservative's boat and puts their effort into defending the standard evangelical theologies, the accuracy/inerrancy of the Bible, showing that the traditional interpretations are the right ones etc. NT Wright seems happy to rock the boat by laughing at inerrantists and wreaking havoc on important parts of traditional protestant theology. "Arch-Conservative"?

If you're not going to count NT Wright then no. But that's due to my limited knowledge on the issue more than anything else - except for Spong and Wilson I don't know which liberal/athiest writers have touched on the issue never mind what they thought about it.

Vorkosigan

NT Wright seems happy to rock the boat by laughing at inerrantists and wreaking havoc on important parts of traditional protestant theology. "Arch-Conservative"?

The Catholic conservative rag Crisis used to host an article with seven historical suppositions of his. They were extremely conservative. One was that faith and history ought to be mixed. The stuff was posted here a while back, I'll see if I can track it down....

Of course a conservative Catholic is going to make conservative Protestants unhappy. Doesn't mean he's not a conservative, though. The Pope makes Protestants unhappy, but he's not exactly a liberal on theological questions....

Vorkosigan

[ December 22, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

Clutch

Vork,

Nice post: cogent and pellucid.

No, sorry... I mean -- So you keep insisting.

Tercel

Er Vork, Wright's an Anglican.

Tercel

Vork,
No, it's a reference to the fact that you keep stating this as fact, when you cannot actually provide any real evidence of it. (see below for elaboration)

Why draw the conclusion that this indicates "Luke is relating a story in a pile of stories, rather than history" as opposed to the conclusion that "Luke has learnt of a number of events in the life of Jesus, Peter and Paul, and though he doesn't have exact dates he attempts as best he can to relate the events as accurately as he can" or any number of conclusions in between?

An interesting point, but I don't see that your hypothesis explains this any better. If Luke is writing historical fiction and has done all this research to place it in its proper setting as you claim - what then is the point of him omitting exact dating here?

~Shrug~ Are you going to argue that Paul's conversion is non-historical...? And if you're not then how is this a point? -Isn't your argument that the lack of an exact date implies non-historicalness? -If you accept Paul's conversion as an historical event when we don't have an exact date you seem to be being inconsistent.

You're obviously behind on your fundamentalist apologetics website reading: Haven't you ever seen them trumpting archeologist William Ramsay from the rooftops as someone who went out to prove Luke wrong on as many points as he could and only succeeded in finding that Luke was accurate on every point he was able to make a discovery about? Here are some of the claims anyway:

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/2002/2/022front.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/2002/2/022front.html</a>
This skeptic is getting upset about Ramsay's statement that Ramsay had found that in Luke's "references [in the book of Acts] to 32 countries, to 44 cities, and 9 islands, there were no errors."

<a href="http://www.grmi.org/renewal/Richard_Riss/evidences/3trust.html" target="_blank">http://www.grmi.org/renewal/Richard_Riss/evidences/3trust.html</a>
"Among the many supposed mistakes of Luke that have since been vindicated was the mention in Luke 3:1 of Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (A.D. 27- 28). The only Lysanias of Abilene otherwise known from ancient history was a king who was executed by the order of Mark Antony in 34 B.C. We now have archaeological evidence of a later Lysanias who had the status of tetrarch. An inscription recording the dedication of a temple reads, "For the salvation of the Lords Imperial and their whole household, by Nymphaeus, a freedman of Lysanias the tetrarch." The reference to "Lords Imperial," which was a joint title given only to the emperor Tiberius and his mother Livia, the widow of Augustus, establishes the date of the inscription to between A.D. 14 and 29, the years of Tiberius' accession and Livia's death, respectively."

<a href="http://www.slsoftware.com/study/html_outlines/Accuracy_Of_The_Bible.html" target="_blank">http://www.slsoftware.com/study/html_outlines/Accuracy_Of_The_Bible.html</a>
That Iconium was a city of Phrygia and not Lycaonia, Acts 14:1-6. Because the ancient Roman historian Cicero said otherwise, historians long thought that Luke was mistaken. But monuments and inscriptions found in the past century have confirmed that Luke was right all along.
That the rulers of Thessalonica were known by the Greek name "politarchs," Acts 17:6. This name was absent from Greek literature, so it was thought to be a mistake on the part of Luke. But archaeologists have now uncovered several inscriptions which verify that this was exactly the title held by rulers in Macedonian cities in the first century.

How can you possibly know they are fictions? Even if you could prove that the parts you claim are fictions were false (which I very very seriously doubt) how could you ever prove that Luke knew they were false? For all you know those parts might be coming from another source that Luke thought reliable and actually wasn't. The idea that Luke wrote any fictions of his own invention is totally and utterly unprovable.

You surely know I don't buy your hypothesis that Luke used Josephus, so why bother saying that?

I see. And the fact that most people would date the gospel of Peter later than the Gospel of Luke wouldn't at all suggest that perhaps it might have been Peter that's borrowing from Luke (Assuming for a moment interdependence of some sort) not the other way around?

No idea, I've given the Luke/Paul conflicts a grand total of zero study beyond what I'm come across in passing.

No idea, I haven't read anything much on the Pseudo-Clementines either.

One couldn't say the same about the Gospel of Matthew since the patristic references talk about some sort of Aramaic Matthew which simply doesn't square with anything else we know.

What do you mean "contradicted all of them"? Are you suggesting that all of the following are true (!?):
1. The Pauline epistles Luke had contradicted themselves.
2. He wrote Acts in harmony with one side of the set of contradictory epistles.
3. The set he happened to use has since vanished off the face of the earth.
4. And we are left only with a set that contradicts Acts.
Isn't that a rather tall order? If there were contradictory epistles circulating isn't Luke likely to have used those that were most widely accepted as his basis - making it unlikely that the ones he used would vanish while the others survived so well. This would seem to pose difficulties to a late dating also - if you push for you late dating of Acts, you don't have much time for these hypothetical epistles to disappear beyond trace before you get to Marcion.

But if he knew about them and knew they contradicted him, why didn't he just change his story to agree with them. If as you say, he was writing fiction in all of this it would be very simple for him just to mold the story in whatever way was necessary to agree to the few short references to events that are in the Epistles.

Perhaps a very relevant tangent is the question of why Luke was writing and why he wrote about what he wrote about. Especially with regard to the question of why he choose Paul as his main character.
If Luke wrote before Paul had become a widely recognised apostle then who would care about him except the churches he evangelised and his companions?
If Luke wrote after Paul had become a celebrity, then surely the letters of Paul would have been of great public interest and the source of the greater part of public knowledge about Paul. How then could the author of Acts avoid mentioning them and manage to contradict them?

What then would you say was the public perception of Paul at the time Luke wrote, and what do you think Luke's purpose in writing about Paul was?

[ December 23, 2002: Message edited by: Tercel ]</p>

Vorkosigan

I'll concede the point, but not the issue. I assumed he was a Catholic, since he appears in Crisis from time to time. My apologies.

Vorkosigan

No, it's a reference to the fact that you keep stating this as fact, when you cannot actually provide any real evidence of it. (see below for elaboration)

What, are you claiming that fakes and forgeries do not contain historicizing details? The mere presence of historicizing details does not mean that the piece is history. That has to be established by outside vectors.

Why draw the conclusion that this indicates "Luke is relating a story in a pile of stories, rather than history" as opposed to the conclusion that "Luke has learnt of a number of events in the life of Jesus, Peter and Paul, and though he doesn't have exact dates he attempts as best he can to relate the events as accurately as he can" or any number of conclusions in between?

Because, he obviously isn't. We know he has rewritten his sources because:

• he breaks up portions of his sources and redistributes them, as well as smoothing out "errors" and cleaning up language.
• he rewrites certain stories: in order to deal with the contradictory accounts of Jesus' death at the hands of either Herod or Pilate.
• Some sources we have tell different stories than Acts use of them appears to.

Because he has broken up his sources and rewritten them, he cannot make any claim to chronological accuracy (his sources don't have any chronological reliability either). So he's just piling up the stories, like lists in a fairy tale, according to whatever theological or aesthetic principles he felt important. The reference to Tiberius signals that Luke would love to have accurate chronology, but doesn't.

An interesting point, but I don't see that your hypothesis explains this any better. If Luke is writing historical fiction and has done all this research to place it in its proper setting as you claim - what then is the point of him omitting exact dating here?

That's my point, Tercel. He hasn't done the "exact research" about Jesus' life because he can't: he has no information on it except for what is in the Synoptics, John, Q and Gospel of Peter and Josephus. So he can't be Luke the Historian; his sources don't tell him any details (except for the priceless info in John that relates Jesus to the Temple's founding). The exact research (and then from time to time sloppy on the details) was done in creating the exoskeleton of the story, the historical framework into which the story of Jesus was thrust, like a one of those Chinese banquet dishes where you scrape the meat from the crab, then mix it with flavorings and return it to the shell for steaming.

~Shrug~ Are you going to argue that Paul's conversion is non-historical...? And if you're not then how is this a point? -Isn't your argument that the lack of an exact date implies non-historicalness? -If you accept Paul's conversion as an historical event when we don't have an exact date you seem to be being inconsistent.

No, of course I am not arguing that Paul's conversion is non-historical. But the two accounts conflict. One cannot be true. So the issue is not the non-issue of the historicity of Paul's conversion, but whether the accounts we have of it are fictional. On that score, at least one, and probably both, are fictional.

You quote:
"For the salvation of the Lords Imperial and their whole household, by Nymphaeus, a freedman of Lysanias the tetrarch." The reference to "Lords Imperial," which was a joint title given only to the emperor Tiberius and his mother Livia, the widow of Augustus, establishes the date of the inscription to between A.D. 14 and 29, the years of Tiberius' accession and Livia's death, respectively."

This vindicates Luke how? There is no reason at all a freedman of Lysanias (d. 34 BCE) could not have lived into the first century and left a beneficence.
<a href="http://members.aol.com/FlJosephus2/MailAndFAQ.htm" target="_blank"> In any case, see Gary Goldberg's detailed response</a>. In fact, it is not at all clear that Luke hasn't made another mistake, and your fundy has, as fundies invariably do, rushed in where scholars fear to tread.

The other two cases do not permit you to exit the problem of historicizing details and forgery/fiction. Luke was writing a piece of fiction that brings in a ton of history and a wealth of detail.

How can you possibly know they are fictions?

Have you read Eisenman yet? He makes a strong case. In any case, it appears you have read neither Eisenman nor the Pseudo-Clementines. Since you admit that, I'll confess to having read only snippets of them.

Additionally, Eisenman makes heavy use of Josephus to show that the author of Acts is writing fiction. For example, during the Temple Wall Affair in 62, both sides appeal to Rome. Ten persons were sent. As Eisenman says on page 503:

• "Ten other unnamed participants in the Temple Wall Affair were sent to Caesar as well. Since their appeals occur at exactly the same time as Paul's in Acts, it is hard to conceive they are not connect in some manner. In fact, all do relate in one way or another to barring Gentiles or their gifts from the Temple, the issue that starts the War against Rome.(italics original)

Over the next 20 or 40 or 60 pages, one is bludgeoned with historical references in typical Eisenman fashion (Eisenman is to references what MIRV missiles are to overkill) as he fills in the background for his topic which shows that Acts does two things in relation to the serious story in Josephus: (1) it overwrites it and (2) it leaves important things out that may have important ramifications for Paul. Creative overwriting, it looks like.

Even if you could prove that the parts you claim are fictions were false (which I very very seriously doubt) how could you ever prove that Luke knew they were false?

Because they contain overwrites in Lukan language and style. Luke wrote them. QED. And because of the other arguments I've made here. And because of the arguments Eisenman makes concerning Acts.

For all you know those parts might be coming from another source that Luke thought reliable and actually wasn't. The idea that Luke wrote any fictions of his own invention is totally and utterly unprovable.

Really? So the Gospels of Mark and John came with instructions about how they were to be sewn together with Q? Do you think Luke knew what words Stephen said at his own death (do you think an angry mob gave him time to talk before they stoned him?)? Of course Luke wrote knowing fictions – he was writing religious propaganda! The very act of forming a historicizing framework is that act of a knowing writer of fiction. And of course, the fact that his sources contradicted each other means that he had to "harmonize" them – that quaint word that means write fiction in order to make the sources agree.

Further, when Luke has Paul face down the Jbap followers in Acts 19, that is done because they were a thorn in Christianity's side in his time. That's piece of theological fiction with theological purpose. According to Luke's gospel sources, Jbap had only one role – to announce Jesus' coming….and there is the problem of the Lukan overwrites of the Psuedo-Clementine source(s).

Finally, I urge you to read Eisenman.

You surely know I don't buy your hypothesis that Luke used Josephus, so why bother saying that?

Stuffing your fingers in your ears won't make it untrue. Mason's case is overwhelming. Go and re-read Carrier's piece on it. And Eisenman makes extremely good use of this fact.

I see. And the fact that most people would date the gospel of Peter later than the Gospel of Luke wouldn't at all suggest that perhaps it might have been Peter that's borrowing from Luke (Assuming for a moment interdependence of some sort) not the other way around?

Not if they both draw on the same source. Further, why would the writer of Peter discard the story of Pilate and substitute one of Herod? By the second century, Pilate was already confirmed as a closet Christian, a trajectory already evident in the canonical gospels (showing that they are later rather than earlier). In any case, as I recall, the genetic relationship is supposedly with Matthew (based on the similarities in the tomb story…)

No idea, I've given the Luke/Paul conflicts a grand total of zero study beyond what I'm come across in passing.

Well, Tercel, I can only ask again:

• There are TWO questions here. In addition to the basic reality of these events, does the account "Luke" created of them reflect the reality of these events? For example, does Luke's account of Paul's journey to Athens reflect the "real" trip that Paul took. Probably not. The Pauline letters contradict Acts on many points. Which account do you consider fictional?

Isn't it time you gave the Luke/Paul conflicts some thought?

One couldn't say the same about the Gospel of Matthew since the patristic references talk about some sort of Aramaic Matthew which simply doesn't square with anything else we know.

Tercel, the gospel of Matthew ended up first in the canon. The fathers obviously thought it was the first written. That's all I meant.

What do you mean "contradicted all of them"? Are you suggesting that all of the following are true (!?):
1. The Pauline epistles Luke had contradicted themselves.

Why not? Luke had multiple and conflicting sources for Jesus life (Synoptics plus John, Q and Peter) and his relationship with Jbap (Josephus, Q, the history of his own time). Since many letters of Paul circulated (in fact, by some accounts, Luke wrote the Pastorals!!) there is no reason at all that he could not have had a set of contradictory letters from "Paul," and simply picked the wrong one or set of them.

2. He wrote Acts in harmony with one side of the set of contradictory epistles.

He didn't use Paul's letters. So what did he use?

3. The set he happened to use has since vanished off the face of the earth.

Of course. We know letters of Paul have vanished.

4. And we are left only with a set that contradicts Acts.

Yes, it's rather widely agreed that the two writings contradict each other.

Isn't that a rather tall order?

Do you have some other explanation? Tercel – this is YOUR idea. Think about it. You claim Luke faithfully copied a source. Fine. Whatever source he used – spurious letters of Paul, a diary, messages from cereal boxes – contradicts the current letters of Paul. There's no way around that.

Consider this: whatever source Luke used, it had to have Paul's imprimatur. Otherwise, Luke would have rejected it. If it was not letters, then it was a history. No matter how you cut it, either Luke invented his story out of whole cloth, or Luke used a source that had "PAUL" written in big letters on it somewhere. My own view is that he rewrote his sources extensively and creatively as his theopolitical needs required.

If there were contradictory epistles circulating isn't Luke likely to have used those that were most widely accepted as his basis

Perhaps. Problem is, we don't know which ones were widely circulating….since Paul's letters appear to have gone underground for quite some time.

- making it unlikely that the ones he used would vanish while the others survived so well.

Consider all the gospels referred to in antiquity which we no longer have, or only have parts of. Consider all the widely-circulated stuff from history which has simply vanished….

This would seem to pose difficulties to a late dating also - if you push for you late dating of Acts, you don't have much time for these hypothetical epistles to disappear beyond trace before you get to Marcion.

Whatever the source was – and there is no need to focus solely on epistles, it may well have been something else – it and Marcion may well have had nothing to do with each other. After all, Marcion may not have liked whatever source Luke used either….

But if he knew about them and knew they contradicted him, why didn't he just change his story to agree with them. If as you say, he was writing fiction in all of this it would be very simple for him just to mold the story in whatever way was necessary to agree to the few short references to events that are in the Epistles.

But Luke's problem was that all his sources contradicted one another. Josephus and the other gospels had nothing to say about Paul (unless you read Paul as the Saul of Josephus, as some do).

Perhaps a very relevant tangent is the question of why Luke was writing and why he wrote about what he wrote about. Especially with regard to the question of why he choose Paul as his main character.

Yes, a very worthy tangent. Glad you raised it.

If Luke wrote after Paul had become a celebrity, then surely the letters of Paul would have been of great public interest and the source of the greater part of public knowledge about Paul. How then could the author of Acts avoid mentioning them and manage to contradict them?

I don't know. But he did so. I don't know any way to answer this question without information from the author himself.

What then would you say was the public perception of Paul at the time Luke wrote, and what do you think Luke's purpose in writing about Paul was?

I think Paul was already a legend associated with gentile and imperial Christianity, and the purpose of Acts is further glorification of Paul at the expense of James and provincial, Jerusalem-oriented Christianity.

Vorkosigan

[ December 23, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>